128 notes &

They are completely different formulations,” said one spokesperson of two antiperspirants with the exact same percentages of the exact same ingredients.

9 notes &

At the startup-focused Grow Conference in 2011, [Matt van Horn’s] presentation included bikini-girl images from his calendar. He prefaced the slides with a laughing, “I’m sorry for being sexist. I apologize in advance.

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You could argue that money is more important for men. I think a guy in their first job, maybe because they expect to be a breadwinner someday, may be a little more money-conscious. To attribute everything to a so-called bias in the workplace is just not true.

20 notes &

Enough ladies. I get it. You have periods… But we’re approaching peak vagina on television, the point of labia saturation.” The current female T.V. boom contrasts with “Two and a Half Men” portraying women as bimbos, something Aronsohn isn’t about to apologize for. “Screw it… we’re centering the show on two very damaged men. What makes men damaged? Sorry, it’s women. I never got my heart broken by a man.

52 notes &

The researchers, who used data collected from African-American girls and women ages 15 to 21 living in a low-income area (we’ll come back to that in a sec), did indeed conclude that “adolescent women whose boyfriend is their primary source of spending money may not explicitly exchange risky sex for money, but their relationships may be implicitly transactional.”

Well, duh.

Is this conclusion truly publication-worthy? Of COURSE their relationships are transactional—every single relationship is transactional. And it doesn’t matter what one’s socioeconomic status or racial or ethnic background is; it doesn’t matter what the gender(s) of the partners in the relationship are. We all negotiate wants, needs, and desires with our partners. We make choices based on what we have and do not have. We communicate well, we communicate poorly—and we make decisions with which some will agree and others will disagree.

The difference here, however, is that what was being examined was whether the male partners of these young women provided them with money. And right there you have a not-so-veiled statement: low-income, African-American girls are whores. Think I’m exaggerating? Just read the key words beneath the article’s abstract, which include “sexual behavior; safe sex; adolescent” and “prostitution.”

What if we took a look at a middle-income, white couple in their early thirties? One partner or spouse works outside of the home, and the other stays at home and raises their 2.5 children. This is a transactional relationship. In a male-female relationship, we will most likely see the male partner playing the breadwinner role and the female partner staying home—although this has been shifting more over the years with more stay-at-home dads. The choice of who will work and who will stay home is a transaction between the partners. It is one that involves and reflects, among other things, each partner’s capacity to earn money. Yet no one would look at the stay-at-home mom in this example who accepts money from her partner to run their home as being “paid” by her spouse, and certainly no one would imply that any stay-at-home mom is a prostitute.

2,091 notes &

And yet a woman’s weight is seen by American culture as an outward manifestation of her personal worth. If she is overweight (a tricky term that I hate – over what weight?), she has failed as a woman. If she is overweight and not actively seen to be doing something about it (exercising for sixty-eight percent of her waking hours, eating three pieces of lettuce and a tomato for every meal, going to a nutritionist, going to a gym, going to a personal trainer, hiring a personal chef, getting costly and dangerous surgeries to butcher the shape of her stomach, publicly demeaning herself and her body so that the world knows she understands it’s not good enough), she has failed as a woman. If she is overweight and feels like eating a hamburger instead of a salad one day, she has failed as a woman.